Andy Warhol's Velvet Underground And Nico DVD

"Andy Warhol's Velvet Underground & Nico"
The Velvet Underground & Nico is a portrait of the group recorded during a rehearsal session at the Factory. Presumably filmed in January 1966, it shows the group rehearsing for what was probably going to be their debut the following February at Film-Makers' Cinematheque. The music is made of an instrumental piece; Nico, the German singer and actress that Warhol hat introduced to the group is seated on a stool playing the tambourine while her son Ari playes at her feet. The two reels contain a large amount of wild camere movements and psychedelic style zoom shots, which seem to indicate that this film was created to be screened, probably on a double screen, with Velvet Underground playing live. It is not hard to be imagine the effect this screening could have had in a corwded and enormout theatre, in an atomosphere with a certain kind of music, wild dancing and strobe lighting. The second reel of the film, almost wanting to document the status of an alternative cultural product, records the arrical of the New York police right in the middle of the filming, following the telephone calls protesting about the noise level coming from the Factory apartment. In the scene we see an embarrassed policeman breaking in and turning off the amplifier, after wicht the rehearsal is interrupted and the camera moves back to the entire studio. This is on of the few pieces of documentary evidence of the Factory in Warhol's films, where we see Warhol while he is speaking to the police, while Velvet, Gerard Malanga, Billy Name and other regular Factory guests are hanging around.
Regisseur: Andy Warhol

"Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable"
Andy Warhol's hellish sesnorium, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, was, while it lasted, the most unique and effective discotheque environment prior to the Fillmore/Electric Circus era, and it is safe to say that the EPI has never been equaled. Similary, Ronald Nameth's cinematic homage to the EPI stands as a parangon of excellence in the kinetic rock-show genre. Nameth, a colleague of John Cage in several mixed-media environments at the University of Illinois, managed to transform his film into something far more than a mere record of an event. Like Warhol's show, Nameth's EPI is an experience, not an idea.
In fact, the ethos of the entire pop lifestyle seems to be synthesized in Nameth's dazzling kinaethetic masterpiece. Here, form and content are virutally synonymous, and there is no misunderstanding what we see. It's as thought the film itself has exploded and reassembled in a jumble of shards and prisms. Gerard Malanga and Ingrid Superstar dance frenetically to the music of the Velvet Underground (Heroin, European Son, and a quasi-East Indian composition), while their ghost images writhe in Warhol's Vinyl projected on a screen behind. There's a spectacular sense of frantic uncontrollable energy, communicated almost entirely by Nameth's exquisite manipulation of the medium.
Regisseur: Ronald Nameth